Art Collectors Insecure, Regretful

Well here’s a good one from the pages of TheEconomist about collectors competing over a coveted work of art at a fair:

At Art Basel dealers with a trophy work on their stands will quietly compile a list of people interested in the work and then offer it to the collector they think offers the best home for the work. Other collectors in the queue will torture themselves, worrying about who is considered more worthy. To ease their feelings, dealers will often say that a museum has reserved the piece. “You suspect it’s not true,” one collector explains, “but the defeat is less humiliating if you think your opponent is a major institution like MOMA.”

Also collectors experience a “sense of regret” when they later sell a work because “selling art has a long association with debt, death and divorce. No one wants to look like they need the money.”